In what must be the worst quality recording you've ever heard on CD, Lucia di Lammermoor, recorded live in Turin in 1967 and issued by an obscure German record label, gets under way. After 15 minutes Edgardo enters, in love with an aristocratic woman about to be subjected to a forced marriage who loves him in return.
The young Renata Scotto as the woman, Lucia, is remarkable enough, but she is now joined by someone to match her. It's the young tenor Luciano Pavarotti, aged 32 and possessing a voice that only appears a few times in a century, the classic, wine-glass-breaking, heart-breaking Italian-style tenor.
The recorded sound quickly improves, uncovering a performance of heroic magnificence. Pavarotti's voice is supremely fine, ringing in the higher register, rounded and pure in the lower. The opera, full of echoes of Hamlet (the most influential text on European Romanticism) and based, as so many operas of the period were, on a novel by the Scottish novelist Walter Scott, careers to its tragic conclusion. But Pavarotti was all set to go on to a career that would dominate the next 40 years.
Most people will know him as one of the "Three Tenors," and it's true he is equaled in fame by Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras. Carreras is the more romantic figure and Domingo, in roles such as Otello, the greater tragic actor. Pavarotti on stage, as for instance in Franco Zeffirelli's Don Carlos or in the Metropolitan Opera's L'Elisir d'Amore, both of 1992, appears too innocent to be a dramatic character. He's always, you feel, simply himself, smiling his cherubic smile in some outlandish historical costume. Actors are deceivers, and so they can't be innocents. But Pavarotti is innocence personified, laughing with undisguisable joy as audiences cheer after every concert number and waving his voluminous white handkerchief as if signaling to his mother that he's there and it's time for someone to come along and take him home to bed.
Pavarotti is the most lovable of all the great tenors now passing into history. And if you watch the Three Tenors concert held outdoors in Paris in 1998, you will notice that not only is he the last to appear (something his management probably insisted on), but also that he's the one who gets all the best items to sing.
In a sense he was born too late. The great age of operatic tenors was before electricity allowed all voices to be amplified at the turn of a knob. Then their sheer volume permitted large audiences to hear them and large profits to be made by theater managements. But Pavarotti has never been merely loud, as anyone who watches the DVD of him on the stage of New York's Metropolitan Opera, with James Levine at the piano, in their recital of 1996 will immediately recognize.
Here there are no crowd-pleasing antics, but instead true artistry. He sings enough operatic rarities to please any connoisseur and everywhere displays himself as a discriminating musician, albeit one with heroic powers.
What does it matter who gives permission for his private jet to land next week at Taichung's airport or that the city's mayor appears in costume in the TV ad for the concert? Luciano Pavarotti is a great presence on the world stage. When some years ago he told China's leaders he didn't like Chinese opera, only the Italian kind, he was being what he is naturally -- innocent, honest, simple and, because of these very qualities, at his best incredibly moving.
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